


I enter your night like a darkened boat

by tabacoychanel



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst, Arya-centric, Coming of Age, F/M, I wrote something that wasn't a Modern AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-20
Updated: 2018-04-20
Packaged: 2019-04-25 10:54:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14377158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tabacoychanel/pseuds/tabacoychanel
Summary: No War of the Five Kings means Ned never goes south to serve as Hand of the King. No War for the Dawn means no direwolves come south of the Wall. Jon still joins the Night's Watch, however, it being one of only a few good options open to him. Arya hasn't seen him in three years when he comes home for Sansa's wedding.





	I enter your night like a darkened boat

**Author's Note:**

> I was going for "tormented passion" and I ended up with "Arya has conversations." That's it that's the story. I didn't specify any ages so feel free to age the characters up as you see fit.

_I exist in two places._

    _here, and where you are._

— Margaret Atwood, “Corpse Song” 

:::

There had not been a wedding in Winterfell since Lord Rickard’s day. _He_ had only married the daughter of a bannerman, which meant, probably, a minimum of pomp and circumstance. The Starks were not given to displays of pageantry. Yet here was a small freehold’s worth of musicians, encamped within the walls like an occupying force. You couldn’t slip into the kitchens without tripping over a harpist, or venture into the godswood without invading a juggling company rehearsal. And worse was yet to come: Arya pictured the wheelhouse that was even now wending its way up the Kingsroad, flanked by knights, retainers, merchants, camp followers, and a baggage train that stretched all the way back to Highgarden. 

That last was an exaggeration. Probably. 

Merely having the musicians in residence was enough to send Sansa into daily paroxysms of delight - but then, Arya grudgingly admitted, her sister’s love affair with southron singers was one of long standing. Arya’s love affair with cold, hard steel was also of long standing, but Mycah’s additional duties left him scant opportunity to join her for surreptitious practice sessions as he once did: The butcher, like everyone else, was inundated with preparations for the wedding festivities. It seemed that Arya was the only one in the castle not preparing feverishly for the fast approaching day. 

Instead, she went on walks. When she grew impatient with how far her legs could carry her, she saddled a horse. She had always been a good rider, but now she ranged farther afield than ever she and Jon had gone in their long, companionable rides. At the crack of dawn she swept out of the stables, and while she bore in mind no particular destination, she invariably turned north. There was nothing for her in the south. 

This was how she came to miss the Highgarden party’s arrival, and the tedious exchange of greetings that followed. “The baggage train was an hour passing through the gate,” reported Bran, who had watched the whole procession while perched on a gargoyle on the Maester’s Turret — at least until he’d been spotted and fetched down to be presented to the guests. Time was that their mother would have corralled Arya too, would have insisted on her presence for appearance’s sake. Arya liked to think that Catelyn had mostly given up on her. _Mark that down for my life’s achievement: I got my mother off my back_. They wouldn’t even let her near her own dress, which was a mercy; whether the dress was made of Myrish lace or deerhide was of little moment to her. Nobody would even be looking in her direction anyway. It was going to be Sansa’s day, and she was sure to be _radiant_. 

It was the arrivals at the North Gate, not the South Gate, that she anticipated with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. Uncle Benjen had written to say he would attend and so would Jon, _should he return in time_. It was just like Jon to arrange to be gone on a ranging that coincided with Sansa’s wedding. No, that wasn’t fair. Jon and Sansa had never been close, but he would want to be here to support her as much as he would want to be here for Robb or Bran or Rickon if they were getting married. _Just not_ my _wedding, maybe_ , rose the thought unbidden into Arya’s mind. _If he heard_ I _was getting married I bet he would find himself a berth on the fastest ship to Asshai_. 

It hadn’t always been like this. She and Jon used to finish each other’s sentences, growing up. They would start snowball fights together and shove dead worms in Theon’s boots and steal blackberry tarts from the kitchens. Back then there was nothing she could keep from him. _He knew me better than I knew myself_. She felt it in her chest still, the dull ache where Jon used to be, where she could feel accepted and _understood_ without trying to be someone else. There were not many hard and fast demarcations in her young life, but this she could say with certainty: the day Jon Snow left Winterfell was the day that Arya Stark grew up. 

It had been three years. Three years of curt, uninformative letters addressed to their father containing nary a word for her; three years of watching Ser Rodrik instruct Bran daily while she herself trained with Mycah who had never held live steel in his hand before she put it there. Bran was going to be a formidable swordsman, you could see it already. He possessed the same combination of quicksilver reflexes, devastating intuition and sheer uninhibited joy in the song of swords that got Ser Aemon the Dragonknight knighted at seventeen. Prince Aemon was Bran’s idol, as Daeron the Young Dragon had once been Jon’s. _Which of the old heroes from the songs does Jon identify with now?_ She didn’t know. That was the point. She didn’t know anything about him anymore. 

In the stories the brothers of the Night’s Watch were always brave, and honorable, and even handsome. In practice she had seen the rapists and poachers that Lord Edward dispatched for the Wall by the wagonload, and to think that _these_ were Jon’s brothers now, not Robb and Bran and Rickon but these oathbreakers and criminals and misfits … she wondered if he ever compared his old family to his new one. She wondered if he felt like he belonged at the Wall, as he had never wholly belonged at Winterfell. Half of her hoped that he did, while the other half insisted fiercely _he belongs with_ me _. We neither of us fit in, but at least we had each other_. Jon would be the first to tell her it was folly to believe that nothing ever changed. “People change, Arya,” he had said, cupping her face in his hands like he was trying to memorize it. That was the last memory she had of him — the last good memory, as the sight of him riding away in his new black cloak was indelibly mingled with the hot sting of tears. He was wrong. Seasons and people might change, but she would miss Jon Snow until the day she died. 

There was no escaping her mother’s reproachful looks forever, however. Catelyn ran her to ground in the kennels, which was a measure of her desperation. Catelyn was not fond of dogs - nor horses either. Arya, in contrast, was increasingly coming to resent the company of people. 

“Are you wearing that to the welcome feast?” her mother demanded. 

She had not changed out of her riding leathers. She lifted her chin, unrepentant. “You can seat me at the lower table with the servants. That’s where Sansa says I belong anyhow.”

“As much as I am sure you enjoy provoking me, Arya, this is _not the time_. Do you truly want to sink this alliance by embarrassing your sister in front of her bridegroom’s family?”

 _I’d embarrass her by breathing_ , Arya thought. “Well, I wouldn’t want to put _the alliance_ at risk. Maybe you shouldn’t acknowledge me to the Tyrells. Pretend you only have one daughter. Sansa’s the only one who’s ever been good for anything, isn’t she?”

Catelyn inhaled sharply. “I have never, ever wished that you were not mine. You must believe that.”

She had no trouble believing it. “No, Mother, you have merely wished that I wasn’t me.” 

And that was a truth Catelyn could not deny. “I admit it would have been … easier. If you were less willful, or more ladylike. But if I wish you had a different nature, it is not out of a desire to make your father’s life or mine easier. It’s because I think you are not content, Arya.”

Since Jon left, there had been precious few moments when she might have called herself content. She met her mother’s searching eyes stonily, staring straight ahead. 

“The path you’re treading now, I fear you never will be. I fear your anger will swallow up all the rest, and you will never have the chance to know happiness. And I want that for you, Arya; I want it just as much as I want it for Sansa.” That, too, was the truth. Her mother turned to leave her — finally, blessedly — alone with the dogs, adding in parting, “You may wear the grey gown, as long as you let Lise dress your hair.”

In the end, she was seated at the high table but far enough from the principals that she was not expected to sustain a conversation of any import. This was no doubt deliberate. All she had to do was bring a fork to her mouth and avoid spilling wine on her grey gown, her favorite because it was the least stifling of a bad lot. Heroically, she even refrained from retaliating when Rickon flung a pea at her from four places down. A part of her chafed at the injustice: when Rickon did it it was _high spirits_ , when she did the same thing it was tolling the demise of her womanhood. Who did they think had perfected Rickon’s aim in the first place?

Sansa wore the silliest smile throughout the meal. Well, it would have looked silly on any other girl; Sansa never looked less than every inch the highborn lady she was. Willas was gallant and attentive, and when he was sitting down with the cane hooked behind his chair you didn’t even notice the limp. When Sansa wasn’t busy charming her betrothed, she was deep in conference with Lady Margaery on her other side. Arya had glimpsed the two of them taking a turn around the glass gardens arm in arm, heads bent close together, giggling over some shared joke. _At least she’ll have a real sister where she’s going_. Mother and Father appeared pleased enough; relieved, even. What was there to be relieved about? Had there ever been any doubt that Sansa would make a brilliant match and everyone would fall over themselves to sing her praises? There had at one time even been talk of wedding her to the crown prince, but Father had not wanted to send her away so young. Now she was to be sent even farther away — the Kingsroad ended at King’s Landing, and to get to Highgarden you had to follow the Rose Road for leagues and leagues, almost to the red mountains of Dorne — but you didn’t exactly see Sansa complaining. In the Reach she could change her gown five times a day and break her fast with lemon cakes every morning, with a harpist for accompaniment. 

This feast could not be over soon enough as far as Arya was concerned. 

:::

She thought she dreamt the bustle of men and horses in the night. With Winterfell packed to the gills with strange men, their steeds, and a dancing bear or three, it would not be shocking if it was real. In any event it wasn’t a noise that woke her; it was the feeling of being watched. She rolled out of the bed and landed crouched on the floor, one hand wrapped around Needle’s hilt. 

A shadow blocked the moonlight from the window. “Do you know how to use that?” 

“Stick them with the pointy end,” she choked out. She couldn’t breathe. She could hardly believe her senses. 

“So you haven’t forgotten your first lesson. Are you expecting assassins in your bedchamber, little sister?” It was funny how well you could know someone, that you could hear them smile without needing to see their face. 

“ _Jon_ ,” she gasped, because just at that moment she she didn’t know how to form any words except his name. “You’re back.” She didn’t dare move in case she tried to touch him and he wasn’t real, in case this was a dream after all.

“Are you going to put Needle down and greet me properly?” He unfolded his legs from under him, straightening up from the windowsill. _He’s taller now, maybe even taller than Robb_. Three years ago she would have leapt into his arms, and he would have caught her up as if she weighed nothing at all, and she would have rained kisses on his temple, beaming unselfconsciously the whole while. Her heart ached for that Arya, the one who would have been ecstatic just to have Jon back. 

“I missed you. Every day you were gone, I missed you,” she told him. It was an accusation.

“I never expected otherwise, little sister.” He didn’t say _I missed you too_ but he didn’t need to. He stayed where he was, making no move toward her, and it was taking everything in her to remain rooted to the spot rather than going to him: She would be damned if she moved first. “I almost talked myself out of coming here tonight.”

 _That_ did not gladden her heart to hear. “Why did you come then?”

“I couldn’t stay away,” he admitted, and from the way he said it it was clear he’d gone back and forth with himself in that maddening way he had of chewing over a problem until he wore it — and everyone else’s patience — to shreds.

Arya mulled this over, the disparity between him being away three years and being in her bedchamber now. “You never answered my letters.” 

“I told you not to write,” he reminded her with a shake of his head. “I told you it was better this way.”

“Because you knew what was best for both us,” she blazed back bitterly. “You left me all alone and now you want to pick up where we left off?”

“No, Arya,” he sighed. “I only wanted to watch you sleep. You’re not normally such a light sleeper.”

“I was worried. I thought you’d be here for the feast.”

“We were delayed. Uncle Benjen’s horse threw a shoe.”

A pause. “I wasn’t sure you’d come for Sansa’s wedding, you see.”

Jon looked at her. “I came for you,” he said simply.

Maybe it was even true. She said, “It was your decision to take the black. Do you regret it?” Her pulse was racing. She waited for him to say there was no place for a bastard at Winterfell, that he was a man grown and must find his own way. She had heard him repeat the reasons a hundred times, though they didn’t feel any more right than they did the first time.

He did not proffer any reasons today. His voice was raw with pain. “What I regret … I swear to you if there had been another way I would never have left your side. But sooner or later you’ll leave Winterfell too, and I cannot follow where you go.” 

He meant that sooner or later she would be bartered off like Sansa to some noble house like a cyvasse piece in a game she was too small to grasp the overall strategy of, even though she was much better at games than Sansa who had no more head for strategy than she had for figures. She said slowly, “His name is Trystane Martell.”

She could feel him stiffen involuntarily from halfway across the room. “It’s settled then?”

She shrugged. “They’ve been exchanging ravens for a year now, Father and Prince Doran.”

“But …. Sunspear. That’s even farther than Highgarden.”

“Father means well. They say Dorne is different, that they treat their girls differently. Maybe I won’t feel as out of place as I do here.” She gave a mirthless laugh. “Still, the day he broke the news to me, I packed my saddlebags in the dead of night and I got as far as the Holdfast before I turned back around. Gave the guards a fright when I rode out of the Wolfswood shouting for them to open the gate.”

His eyes got very round. “You were riding for the Wall.” 

She still didn’t know if it would have been a mistake to keep going, or if the mistake had been to turn back. “That’s always been my first instinct when something’s wrong, hasn’t it? Run to you.”

“Arya …. “

“Don’t. I’ve made my peace with this Dornish marriage. Don’t … make it harder than it has to be.”

“…Do you want me to leave?”

“ _No_. I want you not to have left in the first place.”

When he plucked Needle out of her hand it was as if a great weight had been lifted from her. Carefully he ran one finger down the center of the blade, testing the balance, seeing it was honed and sharp, and she felt the approval radiating off him. “You’ve kept up with your needlework.”

There was only so much self-restraint a person could exercise. She reached for his face first, the familiar grave features deepened by wind and snow. The muscles of his chest were hard and sinewy, and she could feel a knot of scar tissue behind his right shoulder blade under the cloak. “What happened here?”

“Wildling arrow,” he murmured into her hair. She had left it the way Lise braided it, pinned up in a crown above her brow. “I’ll tell you later.”

Good, there was evidently going to be a later. He ran his open palm along her back, only the thin material of her shift separating his warm hand from her skin. She shivered. When he produced a pea from behind her ear, she grinned sheepishly and offered, “Rickon,” and his answering smile was everything she had ever wanted. How had she gone three years without that smile? He leaned down to kiss her earlobe where he had retrieved the pea and maybe his teeth slipped and maybe it was on purpose but when he nipped the tender cartilage it drove all the breath out of Arya’s lungs. “Do that again.”

She had never been more aware of her body, or his body, or the space that separated them. Just now she couldn’t bear to be separated from Jon any longer, and a low whine issued from her as he pulled away, but he was only setting Needle down instead of sending the blade clattering to the floor. Now there was just the sound of the two of them breathing. She stood on tiptoe to kiss his neck in the place it joined his shoulder, savoring the salty taste of his skin on her tongue. “Arya,” he said, “we can’t.”

“Why not? Isn’t this what you came for?” she asked, eyes flashing. “Don’t pretend you thought it would end any other way.”

“I have my vows,” he tried again, though his knuckles never stopped caressing the nape of her neck. 

“You ran all the way to the Wall and shackled yourself to those vaunted vows and it still wasn’t bloody far enough, was it? As soon as you got within a stone’s throw of me … It’s no use fighting it, Jon. Finish it,” she pleaded. “Finish what we started in the godswood.”

With a grunt he picked her up and carried her to the bed.

It wasn’t like it was in the godswood. They had been hurried then, and furtive, and desperate. They were beyond desperation now — they were well into stoic resignation. Arya had never asked the gods for anything except her own pony when she was a girl of eight. She prayed now, fervently, _Give me this one night, give me just a little more time with Jon._

He kept stopping to check she was all right. That was both the sweetest and most exasperating thing about him, simultaneously warning her “This is going to hurt” and assuring her “I’ll make it good for you, I promise.” He was inordinately cautious, she unduly impatient. It was no exaggeration to say she had been dreaming of his cock for three years. In the godswood he had left her gasping and boneless on the ground; he had withdrawn his fingers from her slick folds and brought them to his lips and she had thought she would explode again from how much she loved him. It was his face she saw when she brought herself to climax in the dark, all these years.

He had so many new scars. She could not stop exploring them with eyes or hands or mouth. She wanted to learn the story behind each one, wanted to make him recount every minute of every day that he had been parted from her. Most of all she wanted to feel Jon inside her, as she had imagined half a hundred times in her dreams. When he was poised at her entrance he paused and pressed his forehead to hers. “You say the word and I’ll stop.” She nodded, and he kissed the tip of her nose. 

She cried. She didn’t know if it was from joy or from pain — because he was right, it _did_ hurt, but so did holding a sword or riding a horse if your muscles weren’t used to it. It was worth it, to finally have Jon belong to her and she to him. Here was something that nobody could take away.

Afterward she drowsed, curled up in his arms like a kitten. “Who was she?”

“Mmmm?” he said. He was drawing circles on the plane of her belly.

“You hadn’t been with a woman, when we … before. In the godswood. And you didn’t learn to do that with your tongue from me. Never tell me the Watch is sending its raw recruits to the brothels of Mole’s Town for seasoning.”

He made to pull away but she trapped his palm between both of hers. “Seven hells, Arya!”

“Or was it more than one woman?” At his choked wheeze of disbelief she shook her head. “No, you would have cared for her. You wouldn’t have broken your vows for anything less.”

“Arya,” he began, “you know I’ve always loved you best.”

“I know. Why do you think I wanted you to have my maidenhead? But you were telling me about the woman you bedded.”

His voice grew soft. “She was … a lot like you. Wild and fierce, loyal and stubborn.” 

Arya didn’t like the sound of that _was_. “What happened to her?”

“She put an arrow in my back.”

“She _what?_ ” 

She had been a wildling, according to Jon. She had been trying to protect her people. Her people, of course, were the ones bent on invading the Seven Kingdoms and possibly bringing down the Wall. Jon hadn’t had a choice. He had done what was needed: He had stopped them. 

“But … it wasn’t your arrow that took her, in the end.”

“Doesn’t matter, does it? I’m the reason she’s dead.”

“And you loved her.”

“I didn’t love her enough.” They were lying face to face, so she could see the grief writ plain in his grey eyes, the mirror to her own. He brushed the back of her knee with a finger, feather-light because anything firmer would send her into spasms of uncontrollable shrieking. She was exceedingly ticklish behind the knees. “I didn’t take the black only to get away from you. Even if that was the final straw, not wanting to despoil my little sister — no, stop, listen to me. There are vows and there are vows. Just because you break one doesn’t mean the others dissolve into air. _I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children._ That’s one of them, to be sure. Do you know the rest? Do you know the last one? _I am the shield that guards the realms of men._ That’s the one that counts. That’s why we have the Night’s Watch in the first place. So yes, I lay with Ygritte, and no, it doesn’t make me an oathbreaker.”

“You chose duty over your heart,” was Arya’s verdict.

“No, my heart is here.” He tapped her breastbone and smiled, and something turned over in her chest.

“If I had come riding up the Kingsroad to Castle Black … if Father had betrothed me to, to someone very disagreeable, or fifty years old, or covered in scales … if I had come to you, what would you have done?”

“I think,” he replied gravely, “it’s lucky for the realm that you did not.”

She had thought she was done crying but she swallowed a sob, burying her face in his shoulder. “I love you, Jon. I love you in all the ways you can love someone.”

“Shhhhh,” he said, hugging her close. “I know, Arya. I know.”

:::

He took the pins out of her hair one by one. It seemed to soothe him so she let him, and when he was done he mussed it up just like he used to.

“Have you any friends?”

“One,” he said. Then, “None. Only brothers.”

:::

She will have to burn the bedding — that is, “accidentally” start a fire that will consume the bedding, and a few of her more atrocious gowns for good measure. 

:::

“Beautiful,” he marveled, every time he touched her skin, her eyelids, her hipbone, the soft rounded undersides of her breasts. 

“You are the only one who’s ever called me beautiful. You and Father.” She saw straightaway that it was a mistake to mention Father. “Don’t you start, Jon. You can feel guilty later.”

“How am I supposed to feel? I just deflowered my maiden sister.”

“Do you imagine Trystane Martell would have cared half as much for my pleasure or my comfort?” 

That stopped him, though it sent him off on another equally tiresome tangent. “I can’t bear the thought of you in his bed. If he ever hurts you, I will come to Dorne myself and carve his heart out and lay it at your feet, understand?” She made a noise of agreement, even though it was an empty threat, since there was no one alive who had the power to hurt her like Jon could. 

He said, “I’m sorry I left the way I did. I thought the solution was to forget you. That was stupid.”

“Yes, it was. What’s the solution?” she asked brightly. He froze, and she curled her fingers around his elbow. “I don’t want to forget. I want to remember us, like this, forever. Who knows when I might see you again?”

“I wish —”

She cuffed him irritably before he could finish. “If you say you wish you weren’t my brother, I will drive the dullest knife in the armory through your thigh.” She did not know how her childhood might have looked without Jon in it, and she had no desire whatsoever to imagine it. “You’re my favorite brother. You’re my favorite _person_. I don’t want to change anything about you even if …. I know your life would have been easier without the taint of bastardy. But if you weren’t Father’s bastard you wouldn’t be you. You wouldn’t be mine.”

Jon was wearing a decidedly dazed look by the end of this speech. “I was only going to say, I wish I could give you the world on a silver platter. But I’m like to get stabbed with a butter knife for my efforts,” he added wryly.

“I don’t care about the world. I just — will you to come back tomorrow night?”

He hesitated. 

“Please.”

+

She was late for tea with the Tyrells. She had snatched a pastry on her way past the kitchens; she had not slept and it likely showed. There were wrinkles and dirt stains on her three-day-old dress but none on her face — Jon had seen to that. On impulse she touched her cheek where he had rubbed away a streak of dirt with his thumb. “How you manage to do that without even setting foot outdoors amazes me,” he had said, before leaning in for a lingering goodbye-kiss. Which she would do better not to dwell on right now, if she didn’t want to arrive flushed red to the tips of her ears. She had thought about skipping it: tea, Tyrells, her mother, Sansa, all of it. She would much rather have pulled on a hauberk and gone at Bran for a few rounds in the practice yard — she was itching to show Jon how much she had improved. That’s where the boys were at this very moment, a knot of spectators cheering on Robb as he sparred with the Knight of Flowers. She had decided, reluctantly, to pick her battles. If Catelyn saw naught amiss with Arya, she would ask fewer questions. Only five more nights until the wedding. Arya was planning to take a lot of naps. 

There was a shortcut that would allow her to skirt the chaos of the Great Hall, but the corridor was little-used and the hinges of the door must have gotten stuck and that’s how her father found her, tugging futilely at the handle, one foot braced against the wall for leverage, her mouth stuffed with a half-eaten pastry. 

“Don’t they serve refreshments at tea?”

She whirled around, the pastry falling out of her open mouth. “Father!”

She had seen little of her father this past fortnight. Lately he was always in his solar, a scroll in his hand and a frown between his brows, or else speaking in hushed tones with Maester Luwin about who-knew-what. Something serious, by the looks of it. Today he looked almost as tired as she felt, yet he still had a smile for her. 

“It’s hard to eat when you’re concentrating on not chewing too loud,” admitted Arya. Septa Mordane had made a point of reprimanding her twice this week.

“In that case, we’d best replace your breakfast. Come, walk with me.”

She could not have come up with a better excuse if she’d invented one herself. She fell in step with him with alacrity. She expected she’d have to hurry to keep up with her father’s long strides, but he slowed his pace to match hers. They were taking the long way around to the kitchens, it seemed. “Did you ever wonder why Sansa and Willas will wed here and not at Highgarden?” 

Arya could not say she had. She had thought the infestation of Tyrells a punishment visited upon her personally.

“When I wed your mother it was in the sept at Riverrun, in the light of the Seven. And she was not the only bride. You’ve never met your Aunt Lysa.” 

“Mother doesn’t talk about her much.”

“They were as different as the sun and the moon,” he explained, and Arya could see where this was going and she wasn’t sure she liked it. 

“They left, one for the North, one for the Vale. Neither sister has returned since. Think about that: your mother has not been back to Riverrun since she carried Robb away as a babe in arms.” 

“It’s a long ways. You have to cross the Neck and everything.”

“That’s so. And the road is longer to Highgarden.”

“Are you saying that Sansa won’t ever come back?” Even Sansa might miss Winterfell once she’d gotten her fill of tourneys and feasts. 

“Oh, when they bury my bones in the crypts alongside your grandfather, she will come to pay her respects. But she will be a woman grown with children of her by own then.”

Arya objected to this idea on several counts. To begin with, she did not like to hear about anyone burying her father’s bones. “But Sansa’s already a woman grown and flowered, else how could she be a bride?”

Her father touched her cheek in the same place Jon had not an hour earlier. It felt like he was saying goodbye, too. “There is more to growing up than flowering, child. Sansa has a great deal more growing to do, and so do you.”

She had not been paying attention to where their feet were carrying them. It was not until they left the shadow of the keep that she realized they must be taking the _really_ roundabout route to the kitchen. The gate to the godswood stood before them, twined in ivy. Her father unlatched it and gestured for her to precede him. She took in the smell of pine and earth, a comforting smell that grounded her; she had always found it so.

“They’ll be married here.” 

Arya turned to him in surprise. “Not in the sept?” That was what came of avoiding the wedding preparations so assiduously, she supposed: she had not known. 

“If they were going to be married in a sept, it were better we all decamped to Highgarden and did it there. No. These trees are older than the walls of Winterfell, and their roots go deep. They will still be here when the walls have crumbled to dust. Lord Mace and the Queen of Thorns dragged their wheelhouse across half a continent so we might have the ceremony here. For Willas is not merely wedding Sansa — he is wedding the North.”

Arya had to stop herself blurting out the obvious, that Robb would inherit Winterfell and reign as Lord Paramount in the North, because she did not think that was what her father was getting at. “I’m of the North too,” she protested.

“Yes, my fierce little cub. No one who looked upon you could doubt it.” He tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “Sansa, though. Sansa takes after your mother.” All her life she had been compared unfavorably to Sansa, who was the picture of grace and beauty. That there might be something she could do _better_ than Sansa — some quality the world valued and held in high esteem — that was a new thought. She turned it over in her mind, the symbolic significance of exchanging cloaks under the watchful gaze of the Old Gods.

She said, “You want to remind people that Sansa is of the North? Which people? Why is it suddenly so important?”

Maybe there was a reason he seemed so tired lately. There was much she had missed in her single-minded determination to duck out of all things wedding-related. Yet her father didn’t answer her question. He seemed to answer another question entirely when he said, “I am sorry to send you so far from home, Arya. I had hoped to keep you closer …. mayhap Greywater Watch …”

It had not been home since Jon left. “If Sansa can do it so can I,” she assured him with more conviction than she felt. 

He sighed. “This may be the last time I’ll have you all together under the same roof. You, Sansa, Robb, Bran, Rickon ….”  


“Jon,” she finished for him.

“Yes, Jon.” He looked sad as he said it, for some reason, even though Arya knew her father loved Jon as much as he did the rest of them. “The two of you all caught up?” Arya froze. “Give me some credit. I know Benjen’s party arrived in the night, and I know you would not be on your way to tea with the Tyrells if you hadn’t already seen Jon.”

Thank the gods her father didn’t know the whole of it (with luck she would _never_ actually make it to tea). “I told him I’m going to Dorne. He said I was very brave.” _He said he’d carve Trystane Martell’s heart out._

“He’s right.” Her father smiled at her, and there was genuine joy in it, even as the joy was tinged with sadness. “You are a brave little wolf. But you must remember what I told you. Relations between Highgarden and Sunspear are not … easy. Remember, when the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.”

Arya thought of her mother then, and her aunt in the Eyrie whom she had never met. _They are fish. We are pack_ , she decided firmly. Sansa was insufferable but she was pack, just as Jon was pack. You couldn’t pick and choose who your pack was; the only thing you cold do was defend them against all comers. “l’ll remember, Father. I promise.”

:::

That night Jon told her without preamble, You’re wrong. About what? she grumbled. In another life I’d still be yours, he vowed. And she didn’t contradict him — she couldn’t, not when his mouth came down on hers.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry I was not able to provide actual godswood sex. If you want you can pretend it happened the way it did in one of the wonderful fics which do depict godswood sex, which is what I did tbh.
> 
> I'm also sorry if Arya and/or Sansa seemed OOC but a lot of their current canon characterization is a result of the hellish experiences they've both been through and this is an AGOT AU where everybody is ALIVE goddamnit and Bran is going to be a KNIGHT.
> 
> Please don't ask me to elaborate on Southron Ambitions 2.0 because I have no idea what's going on there. Fortunately neither does Arya. There must be a reason Ned's marrying both his daughters into other Great Houses instead of, say, the Jojen Reed match he seems to have been leaning toward before something caused him to change his mind, but only the gods know what it is, I don't.


End file.
